General Mills: Transforming Safety in a Global Food Company

A focus on achieving a ‘zero-loss culture’ – with the goal of making
safety not just a priority, but a value – has reduced the company’s
global total injury rate.

150 years of making food people love

General Mills, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a leading
global food company with brands – such as Cheerios, Betty Crocker,
Blue Buffalo, Pillsbury, Haagen-Dazs, Annie’s and Cascadian Farm, to
name just a few – that are enjoyed in more than 100 countries on six
continents.

Throughout its history, General Mills has invested in making the
world around it better and their workplaces safer. They believe that
being successful in the marketplace and being a force for good go hand
in hand. This belief is more important than ever for General Mills as
the company navigates enormous changes in its industry and the global
economy.

Consumer expectations for food companies have never been higher.
Consumers are increasingly looking for foods that reflect their values
from a company they trust. General Mills is committed to responding
with expanded offerings, new product benefits and increasing
transparency about the sourcing, production and safety of their food
products.

At the same time, General Mills believes that the health of its
business depends not only on the health of the planet, but on the
safety and health of its employees. The idea of workplace safety is
not at all new to General Mills. More than one hundred years ago, a
mill explosion in downtown Minneapolis resulted in loss of lives that
led to a strengthened company commitment to employees and to community
philanthropy.

General Mills has always had a strong food safety culture with a
“halo effect” on human safety. Throughout the company’s history, human
safety has been a priority to plant managers who have long been
committed to “doing the right thing” and to taking care of the people
who work for them.

Balancing world-wide growth with world-class safety

General Mills has always placed a high degree of value on safety but
the responsibility for improving safety largely rested with plant
managers which resulted in a plant by plant approach to workplace
safety and a fragmented strategy for building safety culture. As a
result, by 2011 General Mills’ workplace safety improvement was
stalling. Chief Supply Chain Officer John Church saw an opportunity
for a more standardized approach to corporate safety performance
improvement. Church directed the VP of Health, Safety, Environment and
Engineering, Gregg Stedronsky, to integrate the existing safety
organization into Engineering and conduct safety benchmarking as the
initial step of a new global investment in safety.

As part of this investment, Stedronsky turned to DuPont Sustainable
Solutions (DSS) to partner with, based on their unique blend of safety
management practices and deep engineering operations experience. With
over 215 years of operations history at 240 plants worldwide, DSS
stood out as an expert practitioner of its own safety processes.

According to Stedronsky, DSS was also engaged for their extensive
experience in assessing and improving workplace safety culture,
bringing clients practical real-life experience, and for their success
in assisting organizations worldwide in their safety journeys. He
shared, “Our Innovation, Technology and Quality (ITQ) organization had
demonstrated years earlier that by improving the culture of safety,
the injury rate would fall. We knew we needed to focus on culture and
DSS was a good fit to help us get better.”

The initial engagement involved teaching people to be better at
safety, and senior leadership was the first audience. To kick-start
the process, General Mills surveyed 15,000 employees to gain initial
insights into safety behaviors and perceptions of management’s safety
leadership.

Based on the findings, a multi-year strategy was developed to create
a customized safety management and training capability. The objective
of General Mills’ strategy was to develop a world-class safety culture
that complemented the company’s strong corporate value system and to
increase process standardization and operating discipline to create
value in other areas, including quality and system performance,
finance and logistics.

The phased and sequential approach was intended to be transformative
rather than transactional by attacking problems at the root cause. The
goals were to help strengthen corporate and site safety governance, as
well as develop critical corporate safety processes and customized
training for direct delivery. As a result, an ongoing transfer of
knowledge would continue to positively impact the safety culture at
General Mills.

Gregg Stedronsky shared, “DuPont took the time to get to know us as
an organization and helped with understanding our culture, so we could
adapt DuPont’s approach without diluting its effectiveness. As a
result, we’ve embraced the safety observation process and changed
safety leadership behaviors as we strive for zero-loss. To date, we’ve
conducted over 2 million safety contacts to remind ourselves to be
safe at work and when leaving to go home. We’ve also trained over
1,000 team leaders and 5,000 employees as we continue on our journey –
and that’s just the beginning.”

Global standards established for a zero-loss culture

General Mills’ focus on achieving a zero-loss culture – driving out
all losses from its business, including safety incidents – has
resulted in a new corporate approach to managing safety and in fewer
injuries.

In addition to embracing a new safety observation and behavioral
change process, General Mills established company-wide safety
standards in 2015 that provide specific safety requirements, such as
personal protective equipment and risk assessment methods at
production facilities. General Mills continues to expand these
standards to ensure uniform compliance across the company.

General Mills also established a Global Safety Governance Board
(GSGB), composed of regional operating vice presidents, which meets
quarterly and is responsible for safety oversight in the supply chain
and the pace of global standards development. In fiscal 2016, the GSGB
conducted regional impact assessments of detailed safety standards,
aligned with enterprise-wide leading indicators of safety performance,
and initiated the sharing of lessons learned from safety incidents
across the global supply chain.

Safety management systems implemented

Compared with peer food group companies, General Mills has
historically had a strong safety record. But the company is committed
to continue to improve by using clear safety management systems. In
fiscal 2016, global supply chain locations began the process of
phasing in a single standardized Environmental and Safety Management
System (ESMS) as part of the global zero-loss strategy. One global
system will provide process uniformity and expand the company’s safety
and environmental management capabilities globally.

The company continued its commitment to demonstrating and teaching
leaders how to lead in a zero-loss culture. A customized training
workshop, jointly developed between General Mills and DSS, was
attended by 1672 global leaders in 2015 and 2016. In addition, the
newly established Central Safety Committees (CSCs) at all locations
assumed primary accountability for leading and monitoring safety
improvements. Communication within these committees focuses on leading
metrics, process rigor and measuring implementation of foundational
safety standards, providing visibility of process improvements
globally.

Safety leadership and responsibility at General Mills

At General Mills, workplace health and safety are the responsibility
of line management and each individual employee. All employees are
expected to work safely by following policies, procedures and
training. Senior-level responsibility for workplace safety programming
lies with the Director of Global Safety and Environment, who reports
to the Vice President of Engineering, Global Safety and Environment. A
Corporate Safety Council which includes key members of the company’s
leadership team also meets bi-annually to review safety progress and
key initiatives.

“DuPont Sustainable Solutions helped us build a customized strategy
and key processes to improve the safety culture of our organization
over time.”

- Ed Roethke, Senior Manager of Global Safety and Environment at General Mills

Roethke also shared, “What’s different today is the amount of time we
now spend talking about safety versus just 5 years ago. Safety is now
truly a part of our culture and a key value for General Mills. The
overall professionalism and long-standing history of safety at DuPont
simply shows why we respect DSS as a valued partner who is helping us
understand how culture affects our safety journey.”

The results of a sustainable and global transformation

Over the last six years (2011-2018), General Mills has seen a 52%
reduction in injuries. And the company’s recordable rate went from 2.2
to 0.77 — the safest General Mills has ever been.

Safety observations and corrective actions continue to rise as
further evidence of the success General Mills is experiencing on its
ongoing journey to a world-class zero-loss safety culture.

With strong foundational processes in place, General Mills will
continue to focus on eliminating severe incident potential through
more rigorous application of the hierarchy of controls.

The value of DSS to General Mills

By seeking to collaboratively attack problems at the root cause, DSS
helped General Mills on its journey of safety culture improvement in
several ways. DSS provided General Mills with:

Building safety expertise in leadership to drive effort and to
sustain the gains. Worked across several global pilot sites to prove
safety training concepts and implementation of global
standards.

Developing and customizing of Lead
with Safety Training in “Train the Trainer” format for dozens of
global trainers who in turn delivered leadership safety development
workshops to company leaders globally.

As Gale Paul, DSS Project Manager has observed, there are at least
three key takeaways from this engagement which can apply to other
organizations facing similar challenges with decentralized global
operations.

First, it is important to set the foundation for safety
through leadership and effective corporate governance.

Second, to effectively deploy safety improvements globally,
it is essential that in-country or in-region resources lead the
implementation – primarily to help understand any cultural and
language challenges.

Third, to make safety
really stick, it must be embedded in the company’s business
processes.

That’s why leading with safety at General Mills has been
successful. It has raised awareness about preventing employee and
food safety incidents by reinforcing the company’s key safety
principles:

We lead with safety

Every incident is
preventable

We are all accountable

Nothing is more important than making sure employees come home safe

DuPont Sustainable Solutions can help your organization reduce risk
and build a sustainable, effective safety culture. For 50 years, we
have been advising leading industrial companies around the world on
operations improvements and workplace safety. The independent research
company Verdantix has ranked DSS as the top EHS consultancy for brand
preference. Our workplace safety experience can help you not only
identify risks but can also reinforce safe work practices and help
correct unsafe acts and conditions.